Inside Here there are no stars
by Joana Duarte, November 2019
In “Inside here there are no stars”, Sérgio Fernandes presents nine predominantly oversized paintings. Nine paintings that deal with colour, scale, space and above all, that deal with meaning, meaning given by the experience of confronting them with one another or together.
The contrast between abstract colour planes configures shapes and rejects any established mode of image-making in the field of painting. Josef Albers mentions that “in visual perception colour is almost never seen as it really is, as it physically is”, so perhaps this is the reason why Sérgio Fernandes's paintings change according to time spent observing them, as well as according to the variations of light levels that occur at different times of the day. Slowly shapes become progressively lighter or darker, stand out or blend into the background, their boundaries fade away or become defined, spaces are drawn.
The viewer is confronted with a spiritual and contemplative form of colour appreciation that challenges his or her "doors of perception". Through this series of paintings, the artist seems to be pursuing an objective that is external to him and, in some way, unknown, presenting us with an incessant search to achieve something full-filling through painting, something external, raised to a religious condition. It finds roots in Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, The Color Field Painters, whose work is characterized by large areas of more or less flat single colours associated with an emotional, mythic, or religious content. Rothkowitz Spell comes from the artist's confrontation with a Mark Rothko piece whose image has followed him for several months as if a spell had been cast on him.
In addition to this, the oversized canvases challenge the human scale, appear bigger than the body, and stimulate the viewer's focus who finds him or herself involved in a total art experience. Despite the few or none visible strokes we can guess the broad gestures described by the artist's body during its execution. Technically brush stroke erases brush stroke, gesture erases gesture, allowing the immaculate result of each surface and an absorbing perfection that hypnotizes by invoking a suspended time.
Sérgio Fernandes presents us with a series of inner works, that is to say, works that come from his deepest interior which conveyed human emotion in all its splendor, ranging from joy, ecstasy and life and sadness, depression and death. Through his paintings, the viewer is transported to “the void”, to the beginning of everything, to his or her purest and most genuine condition, to a beginning where there are no stars.
“I am empty, I have not a single idea. My work happens because I live, because I see things,” says Sérgio Fernandes.
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